Problem with my nvme and other things

[josey99]

Hi.

For a start i have a 1 tb wd-black sn750 nvme ssd and it's that im mainly having problems with. It holds my windows 11 installation and some of my more hdd demanding games.

Everything in this computer has been stable, fast and fluid for a long time. Had problems nearly 2 years ago but resolved that. About 2 days ago, my brother was in and i went to load up forza motorsport. It loaded slowly but i didn't think anything of it till i tried to load my career. The load screen normally lasts for about 10 seconds. This time it took about 2 mns. A huge noticable increase. Tbh since then now windows is taking forever to load. More than double its usual speed. All games installed on the nvme are taking forever to load and now am getting occasional big hitches in these games when normally they are silky smooth. Also to add i've had a few strange game lockups and explorer lockups that cause windows to shutdown then restart explorer during basic file ops using this drive. That has never happened before.

I've actually found a problem with this using crystal disk mark. The drive normally reads at 3500 mb/s and writes at 3000 mb/s. Well after all thats been happening i ran crystal disk mark to see what was going on. Did not get the results i was expecting. Check the following screenshot. Yes it's reading at around 3500 mb/s like it's supposed to but now the drive is only writing at around 1900 mb/s. So that's a very big drop in writing performance. Fyi my system was idle when i ran that test. Nothing was running in the background.

Screenshot of crystal disk info test showing much lower write speeds.

Screenshot showing the drive stats and the health of the drive. Please note that several apps show it as at 99% health. This was taken directly after the disk mark test so you can see the drive heat up to around 45c which isn't anywhere near thermal throttling territory. It has a decent heatsink on it and normally idles around the 30c mark.

Does anyone have any idea of what's going on or what tests i should run to fault test this drive? My concern is that this drive might be about to die.

 

[josey99]

The first thing I'd try is to clear up some space on the drive. SSDs have a tendency to drop in performance once they start nearing capacity. Whilst 200GB remaining doesn't sound like it should be a little, you need to remember that as it is your boot drive, there's stuff like Page File, Temp Files, Hibernation files, etc that is also stored there that might not get added in something like the software you're using to look on the drive, and so when in use only leaves you with ever less storage.

Thanks for the reply.

Already ahead of you. Just uninstalled a few games and freed up around an extra 183 gb then tested again. Results are the same. Also while doing this i took the oppertunity to shut the computer down then pulled the plug for a few minutes just to make sure it was fully reset. Also ran chkdsk. It shows the drive as health however the report mentions recovery of orphaned files 3 times during the report but doesn't specify what files.

Also to add atm i already have a 13 gb hibernation file and a 8 gb page file and that just under 200 gb it was showing shows that on also file explorer and a hdd gadget i have on my desktop. It now shows almost 400 gb of free space but still it's writing slow. Fyi according to calculations im loosing between 40% - 46.5% write speeds depending on the test it's doing.

Also am looking through my phone atm because im pretty sure there is a screenshot in there showing what this drive is supposed to write at.

 

[josey99]

Show us the smart data in crystaldiskinfo, change the raw values to decimal 10 (function > advanced).

Have a look in event viewer too.

As per requested. Crystaldiskinfo set to decimal 10. Fyi i have crystaldiskinfo running resident in the background of my pc at all times. I use it to monitor the health of my drives and to recieve warnings if a drive is starting to go. I forgot to mention that.

As for event viewer. Nothing specific about the drive itself but i found two things in there that need attention and yes one of them hammers your drive with writes.

Problem 1: Just the other day i updated my nvidia graphics driver. Right arround when my problems started. Well i found all these errors about "Nvidia-Nvtopps-Nvlogs". When googling that error i was taken to a post from a few days ago on the nvidia gforce forums that shows not only are people experiencing strange crashes and lockups during playing (like i mentioned in the opening post) but if you read the comments, someone points to the following...

"The problem is the NVDisplay.Container.exe intensively writes thousands of errors into "c:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\nvtopps\nvlog.etl" file *hammering the SSD with constant loads around several MB/s." (* removed bad language)

This corroberates with another log entry i have saying it has reached the maximum file size (2 gb) for reporting these errors and that further events wont be logged.

So basically my drive is being hammered with constant writes during gaming and that looks to be what's causing the hitching im getting. Also many people on this thread are experiencing similar lockups and crashes. They have confirmed that it's the game ready driver only and that the studio driver doesn't have this issue.

To further add to this. Whenever im running crystaldiskmark my desktop hdd gadget shows it writing at 2.9 gb/s and the temps step up to match that however crystaldiskmark only logs around the 1900 mb/s mark. Something is clearly writing heavily on top of crystaldiskmark when im running the test and as mentioned, the latest nvidia driver has a bug that way. I'm just confused as to why that bug would kick in during a diskmark test.

Problem 2: I found an error in event viewer that when googled sudgests that i may have a problem with my os and that i should run sfc /scannow. Am just about to do that.


Edit: Posted the wrong screenshot but its fixed now.

 

[josey99]

Tried to edit this in but it won't let me.

Got it fixed. It was a combination of os file corruption and a dodgy nvidia driver. I ran sfc /scannow and it repaired files. Also a new nvidia driver is out. I updated from driver 545.84 to driver 545.92. That fully fixed it. The scannow partialy fixed the problem but once i installed a newer driver my drive now runs at full speed again.

@Tetras Thanks for the advice my friend. It was appreciated. I never thought to look in the event viewer but it was that piece of advice that led me to the fix.